The new institute is headed by Vasily Klucharev, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, who previously worked as Head of the School of Psychology. Vasily Klucharev told the HSE news team about what the School managed to achieve in four years, what the new institute will do and how attitudes towards psychology and neuroscience are changing.

Economic growth in developed countries has a dual effect. On one hand, people's living standards and consumer spending are on the rise, but on the other hand, this does not necessarily make people happy and may in fact erode subjective wellbeing and lead to economic crises. A new study co-authored by Francesco Sarracino, HSE LCSR Senior Associate Researcher, examines the reasons behind this phenomenon.

The ‘Green Spark’ installation by Elena Mitrofanova and Ivan Mitrofanov, project coordinators of the Shukhov Lab, and Paolo Bombelli from Cambridge University, has been selected from 68 projects to be exhibited as part of the Polytech Festival of Science, Art and Technology in May 2018. The festival, organized by the Polytechnic Museum, will take place in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

Book chapter

Basic test theories are taken into consideration: classical test theory, item response theory, and testlet response theory. The
theories’ development is presented in the technological context of information revolution of 20th century. The current application
bounds of these theories are evaluated.

Based on the data of a representative poll performed by Institute of Megalopolis Humane Development in April of 2014 among 1516 parents of 1st through 11th grade students of Moscow schools, there are data being analyzed related to parents’ perception of preparation to and taking of SFT and USE. There are results given for groups of parents of school students of various ages: 1st‑4th, 5th‑6th, 7th‑9th and 10th‑11th grade students as well as a detailed information related to specific subjects of the school program. Most of those taking part in the poll believe that regular studies do not ensure passing of FST and USE with high grades with more than 30% of parents believing that additional classes would not allow passing with high grades either. Such expectations normally shape during the first years of their children spent in school. The major drawback for successful passing of FST and USE are believed to be poor training programs, whereas less than 20% refer to poor quality teaching. In parents’ view, students’ passing of FST and USE is accompanied by a series of challenges: starting from their persuasion being that exams are an inadequate tool for knowledge assessment to a fear of being unable to ensure they children a proper preparation to the exams. The authors believe that the issue of FST and USE has become a resource of social tension for families with children in a metropolis.

REALEC (Vinogradova, 2016) is the first in the open access collection of English texts (mainly essays) written by students with Russian as their native language who are learning English at the university. The project team working with the corpus over the last two years have been developing computational tools to make the use of REALEC efficient for both students and their English instructors in preparation for the university EFL examination. This paper considers four tools designed to enhance corpus-mediated work in the classroom:

• easy access to the statistics of student errors in one text, in all texts written by the same author, or in all texts in a current folder, which provides for on-the-spot feedback on the quality of the text uploaded to the corpus;

• automated evaluation of lexical proficiency, which includes commonly used features such as length of words; length of sentences; distribution of words across the Common European Framework scale levels (A1-C2); use of academic vocabulary compared with one of the two lists - the Coxhead Academic Word List and in the Corpus of Contemporary American English; number of repetitions; use of linking words; use of collocations (as attested by the comparison with the Pearson academic collocation list);

• automated test-maker, which extracts sentences from the corpus and turns them into questions for placement and progress testing purposes;

• automated evaluation of syntactic complexity of the text which takes into account features such as mean sentence depth and the average number of relative and adverbial clauses.

The opportunity to get automated evaluation of the variety of syntactic means used in a student text is an important feature for both instructors and learners.

The article examines main elements of the national assessment program NAEP (TheNationalAssessmentofEducationalProgress) in USA. Among these elements are goals of the SIMCE, users of assessment results, information dissemination strategy, forms of information, information products and their characteristics.

Content and methodic of the preparation testing in “Programming” subject in LMS e-Front is given. Necessity and preconditions to the preparation testing are described. The results of application of the methodic are provided.

The article considers a place of formative assessment and feedback in education process and specific properties of these concepts in programming training courses. Systematic description of these significant educational tools is given. As authors knew, no Russian educators neither fully describes these concepts, nor carries out them in daily practice. Authors needed in a formalization of feedback for computer support of training process